For a show that has, quite literally, a spring in its step, look no further than The Last Dance which reveals an amazing story about the superstar basketball player Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls’ sixth championship title in eight years in the 1997/98 season.
The Independent’s Alex Pattle reminds us of the story behind the show. “In the 1990s, Michael Jordan was arguably the most famous human being on the planet. At the height of his powers – and that was quite some height and those were quite some powers – he was the face of not only the Chicago Bulls, but basketball as a whole.” The show, he says, feels like an “exposé, an enthralling piece of television that is educational for the uninitiated but also revealing for diehard fans of basketball.”
In the Hollywood Reporter Daniel Fienberg is at pains to point out why this isn’t just for basketball superfans; the series “examines leadership, American heroism and other subjects, it’s mostly about a basketball star and his journey.” He goes on to say: “But if you come in with even a modicum of enthusiasm, it’s a tremendously engaging, ridiculously fun assemblage of spectacular basketball footage and reasonably introspective interviews with almost everybody you’d hope to hear from on the subject.” The New York Times’ Wesley Morris says that “Few team players had ever become as rock-star, movie-star famous and with nary a scandal the way Jordan had — almost exclusively through athletic supremacy.” He also notes that we all recognise Michael Jordan if we have never seen him because of the power of marketing: “No athlete anywhere will ever have a mid-motion logo as triumphantly hieroglyphic as his, the silhouette as sentence.”
Whilst we aren’t all huge basketball fans here at MustWatch, The Last Dance has enough human interest, big characters and 90s nostalgia to keep us (mostly) hooked. Almost a slam dunk…
First shown May 2020, also on ESPN. You can watch the trailer by pressing play on the show image, or by clicking here.
